Lithuania has started to turn back migrants entering the country via Belarus at the green border.

The head of the border guards, Rustamas Liubajevas, said it started at midnight on Tuesday and initially "more than 100 migrants were not allowed into the territory of the Republic of Lithuania".

He later spoke of 180 people, according to the Baltic agency BNS.

Since June, the EU country has registered an unusual influx of more than 3,000 illegal cross-border commuters from Iraq and 39 other Asian and African countries.

The dictator of Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenko, threatened several times not to stop “drugs and migrants” and armed “radical Muslims” on their way to the EU in the future.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

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Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite signed a decree on Monday evening that allows border guards to stop migrants at the green border and to refer them to the existing border crossings and diplomatic missions as contact persons.

Bilotaite told the Lithuanian television company LRT that this is permissible under international law, provided it is a temporary measure and alternative routes are shown to asylum seekers.

The head of the border guards Liubajevas did not comment on the "tactical solutions" used to stop the migrants. The officials on site decided for themselves on "deterrent measures or other possibilities of action". At the same time, the Lithuanian Interior Ministry distributed a video that is supposed to show how the Belarusian border guards accompany migrants to the border. According to information from the EU border protection agency Frontex, it was recorded from a helicopter that Latvia had made available to the Frontex mission in Lithuania.

It shows a group of around twenty people, including children, walking along a dirt road while an all-terrain vehicle is next to it and then backwards away. Such vehicles would be used by the Belarusian authorities, it said. The video was therefore recorded in the Šalčininkai region, where a particularly large number of migrants had come to Lithuania. Most migrants cross the border without documents and ask for asylum. A small part presumably traveled on to Germany undiscovered on their own.